


hold your devil by his spoke and spin him to the ground

by callunavulgari



Series: TW Bingo [14]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Car Sex, F/M, Female Stiles Stilinski, Fuck Or Die, Knotting, Mating Cycles/In Heat, One-Sided Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Unsafe Sex, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:02:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2041851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles doesn’t ask Derek about the others. Doesn’t ask him about Malia or Liam or Kira or Lydia. Doesn’t ask him about Scott, because she’s pretty fucking sure that if any of them had made it, it wouldn’t have been Derek climbing through her window. At least not alone. It would have been Scott. If Scott had lived, he  would have come for her. Always.</p><p>“I’m with you until the end of the line,” Scott had whispered to her temple the last time she’d gotten herself into the middle of their werewolf shit. She’d been tacky with blood and hurting everywhere, but his words had made shriek with laughter and bump their shoulders together anyway, gasping, “Don’t quote Captain America at me right now, you enormous asshole, laughing hurts!”</p><p>Well, look at that, she thinks, watching the world spin by outside Derek’s SUV.</p><p>End of the line.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold your devil by his spoke and spin him to the ground

**Author's Note:**

> For my TWbingo square: Fuck or Die. Looking back at that tag list, I realize that it appears as if I kind of just tossed a shit ton of tropes into a pile and went with it, but uh, seriously. I just really wanted to write a female Stiles in a setting that wasn't high school/college, and then I got the visual of her wearing her dad's shirt and badge, blood-stained and taking names with the best of them. Not entirely sure where the Peter bromance came from, but whatevs. You take comfort wherever you get it when the world's gone to shit I guess.
> 
> Two more things:
> 
> 1\. This story was written while listening to [this](http://8tracks.com/katekerrfusion/grab-your-gun) and [this](http://8tracks.com/katekerrfusion/the-apocalypse) on repeat.  
> 2\. [Headcanon Ms. Stilinski](http://shamanmy.deviantart.com/art/I-just-fell-in-love-362712584), except mine grew her hair out after high school.

It’s been three days. Three days of rhythmic thumping against her door, of guttural, _hungry_ moans not even six feet away. It’s been two since she scrounged up the package of stale ritz crackers that had managed to get wedged between the bed and the wall. One and a half since she downed the last of the half-full water bottle she’d had sitting at her bedside for who knew how long.  
  
Three days before Derek Hale shoves up her window and squeezes himself through.  
  
He’s covered in blood and soot, but when he sees her sitting there with her back pushed up against the wall, his shoulders do this thing — this horrible, _telling_ thing where they shake and then go slack with relief — and then he’s rushing her, hands roving over skin and clothes alike, burying his face in her hair and inhaling like she’s the best damn thing he’s ever smelled.  
  
“Dude,” she protests weakly. “Back off. I’ve gotta be way too ripe right now for your delicate werewolf sensibilities.”  
  
Derek doesn’t say anything to that, just breathes in deep again, hands trembling as they come to rest against the small of her back. She’s shaking, she realizes. It’s not just Derek who’s trembling, and once Stiles realizes that it's all aboard the train to sob-ville, population: the entire fucking planet, probably. She doesn't even think to protest when he drags her up off the floor and pushes her back onto her bed, hands gentle as he follows her down.  
  
He curls around her, protective to a fault, and it would frustrate Stiles, it really would; _has_ in fact pissed her off to no end whenever he usually pulls this shit, but right now, she probably needs this more than he does. So Stiles lets Derek cuddle her to his chest, lets him stroke up and down her spine and through the tangled knots of her hair, and in return, he holds her together as she falls to pieces in his arms.  
  
She doesn’t know how long they stay like that. Stiles hasn’t been able to really tell time for awhile now, since a power surged knocked her alarm clock out and completely fried her computer. Her cell phone’s been dead since day two, and the only reason that she even knows it’s been three days is because she’s been tracking the sun across the sky, because what the fuck else could she do?  
  
There’s another thump against her door, another moan, and she wonders how long she’s been blocking the sound out. If she tuned it out the moment Derek fell through her window or if it’s honestly just been _quiet_.  
  
Derek must feel her tense, because he shifts back enough to look at her, before glancing over at the door.  
  
“Is that…?”  
  
She nods, jerkily, and it feels like a flinch, like it’s been punched out of her. Derek squeezes her around the ribs, and she wants to fucking laugh until she’s dying, because this is _Derek_. Derek Hale, who sure, is definitely her friend by now, but who doesn’t touch her if he can help it. Doesn’t touch _anyone_ if he can help it.  
  
“Do you want me to take care of it?” he asks quietly, mouth moving against the skin of her throat. A year ago — hell, even a week ago — Stiles would have given her left lung to know what it felt like to have Derek Hale's lips on _any_ part of her body. Now, she can't even bring herself to care.  
  
Stiles hesitates, thinking of the bat under her bed, of how she’d picked it up and turned it over and over in her hands that first day before carefully tucking it out of sight again. She thinks of her _dad_ , who’d gone to bed her favorite person in the entire world and woken up the next morning a monster. In the end, Stiles hadn’t been able to even fully consider beating the thing with her dad's face until his head caved in like a grapefruit. She knew he wasn't him anymore and she still couldn't do it. But the thought of Derek going out there and ending him is worse, makes bile tickle the back of her throat.  
  
She shakes her head, pushes her forehead into Derek’s chest, and sluggishly climbs to her feet. The whole world feels wrong, hazy around the edges the way it is during a panic attack, but there’s nothing. Her chest is cold and she knows the anxiety will hit her later, but right now she doesn’t even care.  
  
“Just cover me until I can get to a gun,” she says, accepting the water bottle that Derek passes her with a grateful quirk of the lips. She doesn’t gulp, but she wants to. The water is still the best thing she’s ever tasted.  
  
“Are you sure—”  
  
Stiles nods again, biting down harshly on her lower lip. “He’s always been my responsibility. Since mom died. That’s not gonna change now.”  
  
Granted, she’d always expected that she’d lose him to too many cheeseburgers, not fucking zombies, but whatever. He’s hers.  
  
When the door opens, Derek catches her dad around the throat and just holds him there as she squeezes past him. The gun safe is in her dad’s office and she’s known the combination since she was eight years old, since the first time he took her to the gun range, because you didn’t just _have_ a curious kid like her and guns in the same house without a thorough schooling on gun safety.  
  
Stiles gets it open now and just looks at the three weapons inside, wishing that one of them were a shotgun. She always liked using shotguns in video games. Kate used a shotgun though, she remembers, even after she’d gone were, and Stiles wouldn’t want to remind Derek of her. Not _ever_ , but especially not now.  
  
When she gets back, Derek’s still holding her dad in the same place. He’s got this look on his face though, like he’s been memorizing everything about her dad, and there’s this curl to his lips that makes her think of Boyd on the ends of his claws. The second Stiles has stepped into the hallway though, his eyes go straight to her.  
  
They track up and down her body, assessing, and come to a halt on the gun in her hand. She’s not shaking, not anymore, but she wants to. Wants to curl forward and cry until something comes along and tears out her throat, wants to hug her daddy one last time, wants to die right alongside of him.  
  
“Let him go,” she says instead, raising the gun. Her hands are perfectly steady.  
  
Derek gives her one last look and lets her dad go, stepping back and quickly away. Her dad — what used to be her dad — stumbles, faltering, and looks around, like he’s not sure where he is or what he’s doing. It makes her chest ache, because that— that makes her think of the way he used to wake up after long shifts, stumbling around the kitchen in the morning until she took pity and just started the coffee pot for him.  
  
He doesn’t look dead, not yet. The rot hasn’t set in, but he’s paler than usual and his eyes— his eyes are what made her realize she wasn’t looking at her dad anymore fast enough to get away that first day. Red sclera, unfocused pupils, and a milky sheen, like he’d developed cataracts over night.  
  
Looking at him hurts, and she feels tears blur her vision when he focuses on her, starting towards her with a cock of his head, mouth gaping. There isn’t blood streaking his chin yet, not like the other ones she’s seen milling around her neighborhood, and she’s going to make damn sure that there never will be. Her dad wouldn't have wanted to hurt anyone.  
  
Stiles bites down on her lip and lets his voice run through her head. Lets his memory remind her about stupid little things like recoil, _because you don’t want to chip a tooth, sweetheart_. She lets him in closer, until Derek is tensing up like he’s going to lunge for her, close enough that if she wanted, she could step forward and wrap her arms around him.  
  
“I love you,” she gasps, tears hot on her cheeks, and squeezes the trigger.  
  
The body just _drops_ , like a puppet with its strings cut. It drops like so much meat, and there’s blood on her face, infected blood, and she’s watched too many fucking zombie flicks over the years to even think about touching her face in case she gets it in her eyes or mouth. God, she fucking hopes it can’t spread through her pores. That would suck, so much.  
  
She just stands there and breathes, staring at the spatter of blood on the wall instead of looking down, and oh, shit, yeah, there’s the panic.  
  
There are hands on her suddenly, and Stiles can dimly feel herself being hoisted up into strong arms, but she has no idea where they’re going until she hears the hiss of the shower and Derek gasping into her ear, “Close your eyes.”  
  
She closes her eyes. Lets him shove her whole body under the spray and just shakes, not even protesting when he starts tugging her clothes off. They’re infected, there’s blood all over the stupid shirt that Scott had bought her for her birthday two years ago, probably brain matter too, and she wouldn’t say a goddamn thing even if Derek stripped her down completely. He leaves her in her underwear though, fingers hesitating against the straps of her bra, and she sighs heavily, wriggling out of them herself.  
  
“Who knows when we’ll get our next chance to shower,” she tells Derek blankly and starts tugging on the hem of his shirt too. She gets it up and over his head before he stops her, trapping her hands against the zipper to his pants. She gives him a flat look and he just shakes his head, sliding the jeans off on his own.  
  
If Stiles were in another mindset, she might have tried to convince him to fuck her. Lydia used to tell her that mindless sex was one of the best ways to get the mind off of heavy shit, and at any other time, having Derek Hale naked in the shower with her might have provoked some kind of reaction. Any kind. Arousal, desperation, embarrassment.  
  
Right now though, she just feels empty. It’s an ache, so fucking deep, and it hurts, like something inside her has been stripped raw and bleeding.  
  
Derek would know this feeling better than anyone, she realizes. He’s felt it time and time again, first with the fire, then Laura and Peter, then his little pack of betas. Somehow he still manages to keep himself going. Maybe she can ask him for tips.  
  
His hands are on her scalp, massaging it gently, and there’s foam on his hands as he guides her head back under the water. Then he’s reaching for the bottle of conditioner, carefully spreading it through her hair like he's washed somebody's hair dozens of times. Stiles wonders if he used to do this for Laura, if that’s where the experience is coming from.  
  
“Mmm, you could totally be a hairdresser,” she remarks, watching a drop of water slide down the shower door for a moment before he dunks her again.  
  
“I was,” he shrugs. “For a little while. It wasn’t bad money.”  
  
“Derek Hale, hairdresser extraordinaire,” she snorts, jumping a little when he moves on to soaping up her shoulders. His hands feel good on her skin, almost too good, and the idea of convincing him to get her off is curling up in her head again, so she takes the soap from him and says with a smile, “I’ll do this part. You get that blood off you.”  
  
After they're both done, Derek bundles her up in her biggest, fluffiest towel and rubs her dry the way her mom used to when Stiles was little. Then he picks her up, and carries her back to her room, her face tucked to his chest the whole time.  
  
“Grab your stuff,” he tells her, dropping her gently onto the edge of her bed. “Pack whatever you need, but try to keep it light.”  
  
She nods and watches him disappear out the door. He’s going to clean up her dad, she thinks, and fights the urge to crumple with grief all over again.  
  
Stiles packs. Underwear, bras, comfy sweats. At first, she almost starts throwing in her usual wardrobe, baggy mens jeans and over-large plaid shirts over baggier t-shirts, but makes herself stop. Baggy clothes won’t do, she realizes. It’s just more material for the creatures to grab hold of.  
  
So she packs the tightest, most functional clothes that she owns, sliding into a pair of jeans and some underwear as she goes. She packs in that, just jeans and her bra, because the shirt she wants isn’t in this room, and she’ll be damned if she goes out there before Derek gives her the okay.  
  
She grabs tampons and pads, a book or two and, on a whim, a cd that she burned back in middle school. Then Derek’s back, so she slides past him and straight down the hall and into her father’s room.  
  
It still smells like him in here. Still smells like the cheap body wash he used and the cheaper cologne he used on occasion. Stiles wants to bottle this smell and carry it with her forever, wants to say yes to the bite just so she can better remember this scent.  
  
She grabs three things from her father’s room.  
  
The first is one of his shirts. It’s his uniform shirt that he’d pulled off four nights ago, fresh enough to be worn again, so the name tag's still attached to the front. It’s simple and khaki, but it’s got the Beacon Hill’s police logo stitched onto one arm and it’s his, so she takes her time buttoning it up and tucking it in. It’s a little loose on her, but it’ll do.  
  
The second thing Stiles takes is his badge, which she finds on the dresser, right next to her mom's old perfume bottles. She pins it to her chest and snaps her hair up into a high ponytail as she goes, pawing through her dad’s stuff until she finds what she's looking for.  
  
The third thing she takes is a blanket, hand-sewn with love, and as far as she’s concerned, it’s more important than all the guns and ammunition in the world.  
  
When she gets back into her room, Derek takes one look at her and his face does this twisty, complicated thing that makes her heart ache worse. Derek’s apparently taken the time to throw the other two guns, the spare bullets, and her bat into the duffle. He hands her the third gun, already stuffed into the holster on her dad's belt. She buckles it around her waist.  
  
“I’m ready,” she tells him, touching one careful finger to her dad’s badge.  
  
They go.  
  
.  
  
Stiles doesn’t ask Derek about the others. Doesn’t ask him about Malia or Liam or Kira or Lydia. Doesn’t ask him about _Scott_ , because she’s pretty fucking sure that if any of them had made it, it wouldn’t have been Derek climbing through her window. At least not alone. It would have been Scott. If Scott had lived, he always would have come for her.  
  
“I’m with you until the end of the line,” Scott had whispered to her temple the last time she’d gotten herself into the middle of their werewolf shit. She’d been tacky with blood and hurting everywhere, but his words had made shriek with laughter and bump their shoulders together, gasping, “Don’t quote Captain America at me right now, you enormous asshole, laughing hurts!”  
  
Well, look at that, she thinks, watching the world spin by outside Derek’s SUV.  
  
End of the line.  
  
.  
  
Peter’s at the loft when they get there, because of course he is. He’s pacing in angry circles, like a caged animal, but stops the minute Derek pushes her through the door, head coming up and eyes fixing on them.  
  
Then he’s all over her, same as Derek was, and she still doesn’t like him — she doesn’t, okay — he’s the same fucker who killed Laura and a dozen other people, the same person who mind-fucked Lydia to within an inch of her life and has no doubt been planning something nefarious this entire time, but Stiles is tired as hell and human contact isn't horrible right now, so she lets him.  
  
She lets him touch her all over, checking for bites, thoroughly, even going so far as to run his fingers behind her ears and through her hair.  
  
“Of course you made it,” she says, absolutely exhausted and heartsick in a way she hasn’t been since mom died. “You’re like a cockroach, man.”  
  
“You found her,” Peter says to Derek, ignoring her completely and letting out this weird, disbelieving laugh.  
  
“Of course I did,” Derek replies, and that apparently, is that.  
  
Peter promptly straps like seventeen knives onto her person, making sure that she still remembers how to use them. He’s thorough, and the part of her that’s just relieved to have someone she knows fussing over her is quiet. The other part of her, the part that still has nightmares about the feeling of his fangs on the upturned skin of her wrist, takes note of the Argent sigil on some of the knives, and wonders if Chris is still alive out there — if he donated the knives and guns to the cause or if they just raided his house after he made like the living dead and walked.  
  
In the end, it probably doesn’t matter.  
  
.  
  
They climb into the SUV the next morning, Derek in the driver’s seat and her riding shotgun while Peter graciously takes the back. She’s still half asleep, the memory of the two of them curled protectively around her like a dream, and for a while, she just dozes, listening to them bicker quietly back and forth.  
  
Stiles has no idea where they’re going, if they’ve got a plan or even a destination in mind, but doesn’t much care as long as it gets her out of Beacon Hills.  
  
About three hours into the ride, Peter passes her a cup of instant coffee and a granola bar. The coffee’s actually hot, and it takes her a minute to realize that Peter’s got a thermos back there to keep the heat in. It won’t last forever, but she’s happy for it now. It makes her feel more human, like that part of her that had gone cold when she blew her dad’s brains all over the wall is stirring.  
  
She turns her head out the window and watches the destruction until it’s her turn to drive.  
  
.  
  
They’ve got one and a half CDs between them — the one that Stiles grabbed before she left and some opera that she doesn’t recognize, which is soothing until it starts skipping horribly halfway through.  
  
For the most part, they stick to Stiles’ horrible eighth grade mix, featuring gems such as Walk Like an Egyptian, 500 Miles, and the best of Missy Elliot, but there’s one awful Avril Lavigne song somewhere near the end of the mix that Peter always makes them skip.  
  
It’s slow going, even when they have to stop to raid for gas cans. They’ve gone a good eight hundred miles before they even see a walker that they’re forced to deal with and then, it’s as simple as Peter skewering it through the ear with his claws.  
  
Zombie movies have given her an irrational expectation for all danger, all the time, she thinks. In reality, it’s not so much like that. Sure, they’re still pretty far out in the boonies, but hell, in The Walking Dead they were in the middle of bumfuck Georgia and there were still zombies coming out of the woodwork half the time.  
  
They’ll get there. She knows that. There’s going to come a time when they’re in a life or death situation, but the whole werewolf thing has desensitized her to the idea of dying anyway. Her whole life is a life or death situation, since stupid Peter Hale with his weird taste in operas and even weirder habit of _being nice to her_ bit her best friend and turned him into a creature of the night.  
  
The point is, she knows damn well that sooner or later, they’re going to run into a horde, and when that happens, it’s probably going to suck.  
  
For now though, things are quiet. Just her, two werewolves, and the open road.  
  
.  
  
When they’re in the middle of Arizona, the car stalls, and for a moment she’s taken back to that horrible time in Mexico, where her jeep had broken down in the middle of nowhere and Scott had to go ahead with the badass hunter lady to find Derek while Stiles stayed behind with the rest of the girls and tried not to cry about the fact that she had no idea what she was doing.  
  
She tries not to panic much, but her heart must go through the roof or something because the next thing she knows, Peter’s whisking her off to sit in front of some piece of shit cactus while Derek paws around under the hood.  
  
They’re back on the road maybe half an hour later, and no one says a goddamn word to her about her near panic attack, or how Peter had forced her to name a shit ton of stars and constellations before she got herself back under control.  
  
They break into a rundown grocery store later that day, one of the shitty roadside ones that was horrible even before the apocalypse, and she meanders down the aisles with a cart, humming tunelessly under her breath.  
  
One of them is always by her side, at all times, and she knows that it’s not because they think she’s incapable of firing a gun. It’s got everything to do with the fact that the virus doesn’t affect them the way it would her. They’re there as glorified meat shields, and this time it’s Derek sticking close to her, rubbing his shoulder up against hers as she contemplates off-brand shredded wheat.  
  
Derek’s always been pretty quiet, but nowadays, he’s quiet all the fucking time. It’s kind of annoying, but even she doesn’t talk as much as she used to. It’s up to Peter to fill in the blanks, Peter who chatters their ears off about anything and everything until she finally snaps and talks back.  
  
“What kind of cereal do you even like, anyway?” she’s asking, and Derek’s stooping down, peering at the cereal boxes like they hold the secrets to the fucking universe when the first zombie shows up over his shoulder.  
  
They’re getting faster, she thinks, and then she’s firing before she even realizes she’s drawn her gun.  
  
Derek blinks up at her, surprised, and then there’s another zombie at the end of the aisle and she’s striding right past Derek and firing again. Then again when her shot goes wide. By the time the third zombie shows up, Derek’s pulled himself out of whatever trance he was in and is leaping past her to crush the thing’s head in his fist.  
  
He looks at his hand afterward in disgust and she lets out a sharp bark of laughter, sliding her gun back into dad’s holster around her waist.  
  
“C’mon,” she teases, grabbing hold of the hem of his shirt. “Let’s go find you some baby wipes.”  
  
.  
  
They’re heading north-east again, all the way through into South Dakota, where everything is corn and farmland. It’s kind of peaceful, if not a little freaky. She’s seen Children of the Corn, man, okay. She knows what can lurk in those stalks.  
  
They spend their first full moon at a farm house in the middle of nowhere off of Route 90. It’s old and was clearly abandoned in a rush, but there aren’t any corpses and furthermore, there aren’t any _walking_ corpses, so she’s fine with it. Both Derek and Peter have been in control of their wolves for a long time (well, Peter lost it for awhile when he was crazy, but supposedly he’s better, so they don't talk about that much, not now that he's being _nice_ ) but Stiles can tell they’ve been going a little stir-crazy, cooped up in the car all the time.  
  
“Dude,” she protests mildly from the old, sagging sofa she’s commandeered as her own. “You can go running. I won’t get munched, seriously. I’ve got a gun, a dozen knives, a bat, and a healthy dose of paranoia. I’ll be fine for the night.”  
  
Peter just looks at her, arms crossed across his chest.  
  
It’s Derek who fidgets, and blurts out, “You could come with us.”  
  
She gapes at him, then laughs. “Not a wolf, buddy. You’d lose me in the middle of the cornfield and then I really _would_ get munched. By the corn babies.”  
  
“We wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” Peter protests, looking slightly offended. She snorts.  
  
“Sure, not on purpose.” When they both just give her their resting bitch faces, she sighs and heaves herself up. “Fine. I’ll go frolic in the moonlight. Happy now?”  
  
Derek approaches her carefully and rubs his nose up the line of her throat. She’s used to this by now. Way too used to the cuddle piles in the backseat and the absentminded scent marking like they don’t even realize they’re doing it. It sometimes still makes her heart lurch, because, well, in Derek’s case, she was already nursing a pretty hefty crush before he saved her life and ended up as one of her last friends breathing, and in Peter's, there will always, always be that memory of his fangs pressed against her skin that keeps her from being completely comfortable with him in her personal space. Even if they are kind of bros now.  
  
Anyway, she’s moderately sure that they can tell whenever her heart does a somersault over Derek either way, but neither of them ever says anything, so she doesn’t either.  
  
“You’re pack,” Derek breathes against her pulse, eyes glowing red in her peripherals. “You'll always belong with us.”  
  
.  
  
Stiles had asked him once, just the once, how he’d gotten the alpha powers back.  
  
Derek had blinked at her, face wiped clean of emotion, and she’d _known_ — breath catching in her throat.  
  
“Scott?” she’d whispered shakily, palms trembling as they skated over Derek's cheekbones. After a moment, he nodded.  
  
“How?”  
  
Derek had hesitated, looking at Peter over her shoulder, and sighed. “He was dying. He’d been bitten too many times and— he couldn’t heal his body and burn out the virus at the same time. So he told me to end it, so I’d get my powers back, and made me promise—”  
  
“Promise what?” she’d asked, half-hysterical, Peter’s hands coming down on her shoulders from behind and nuzzling behind her ear.  
  
“To protect you,” Derek whispered, and she shook and shook, caught between them.  
  
.  
  
They see people sometimes. On the side of the road or loading up at gas stations. The worst are the ones that run after them, shouting for help.  
  
Derek always wants to stop, she can tell. He’s never quite grown out of the desire to save everyone and it makes her cringe the first time she has to tell him that they can’t stop, that they can’t trust anyone.  
  
“I know,” he’d growled, but his knuckles had gone white around the steering wheel until she’d finally laid her hand on top of his.  
  
It isn’t always people asking for help. About five months into the apocalyptic road-trip from hell, she’s taking a piss in the woods — still well within hearing range, because Peter and Derek get irritable when she goes too far, and anyway, she has absolutely _no shame_ around them anymore, not after she’s had to take shits less than ten feet away — when some fucker comes up behind her and gets a fistful of her ponytail, dragging her back and into him.  
  
Stiles wrinkles her nose when he curls a hand around her hip, and there’s fear, sure, of course she’s fucking terrified. She is literally caught with her pants around her ankles and some asshole is pawing at her, murmuring into her ear about how she shouldn’t worry, how he’ll make it good for her, _I just wanna hear you make some noise, darlin’_.  
  
He’s got a hand between her legs, spouting some bullshit about making her so wet, but she waits until he’s fumbling for his belt buckle before she twists the way Allison taught her all those years ago and sinks a blade into his gut.  
  
“You fucking bitch!” he screams, face gone red with anger, and she twists out of his reach again, scowling down at him.  
  
“This is why you don’t ambush strange women in the woods,” she tells him sweetly, hitching her pants back up around her hips just as Peter and Derek come tearing out of the trees behind her. If the way the man pales is any indication, they’re both wolfed out, so she leans down into his space, her bloodied knife held to his jugular, and purrs, “You never know what kind of creatures are lurking out there in the dark.”  
  
Stiles slits his throat happily. Sure, Derek or Peter could have done it, but she wants the satisfaction of knowing that she’s the last thing that asshole ever sees.  
  
Immediately, they’re both at her side, rubbing all over her and rumbling unhappily.  
  
“I’m fine,” she tells them, pressing into whoever’s hand is petting her hair. “Seriously, guys. I’m totally okay.”  
  
She isn’t, not really, but she will be. By now, Stiles is used to shit like this. Not attempted rape. That’s a first, but she’s a girl _and_ the daughter of a cop, okay? She’s always known that something like this might be in the cards, so she’d prepared accordingly, first with Allison and then with Scott and Derek.

She'll be fine.  
  
.  
  
They find a fancy hotel that’s mostly abandoned in Ohio, a dozen or so miles away from Columbus. It’s the closest they’ve ever tried settling near a city, but the Embassy Suites just outside of Dublin is a fucking siren call, promising god-like mattresses and maybe some food that isn’t shaped like a bar and tastes of cardboard.  
  
Peter grabs them one of the premium suites while her and Derek check out the kitchen, getting their hands on everything that isn’t rotten and _blessed_ bottles of water.  
  
When they get up to the suite, they’re weighed down with food and have dispatched two or three zombies wandering the halls, and she’s still laughing at something that Derek had whispered into her ear on the way up. Next to her, he looks stupidly pleased with himself, chest all puffed out, a small smile playing around his lips, like making her laugh is that one rare achievement on Halo or Black Ops that next to no one ends up getting.  
  
Peter looks between them, snorts, and snatches a can of peaches out of her hands.  
  
.  
  
It goes well, for a week or two. They try not to gorge themselves on food and do crosswords that they found in the lobby. They use the ovens to bake chocolate chip cookies and try not to mourn the fact that there's no milk to go with it. The indoor pool doesn’t actually have dead bodies in it and is in decent shape for not having been maintained for six months or more, which is fucking awesome, because that means that Stiles can cannonball into the deep end without worrying about corpses as Peter keeps watch from a deck chair. Derek joins them about an hour later and with Peter’s help, she manages to coax him close enough to drag him in with her.  
  
“Remind you of something?” she crows, swatting water in Derek’s direction.  
  
He raises an eyebrow. “Reminds me of almost drowning.”  
  
She rolls her eyes at him. “You big baby, it wasn’t any worse than all of the other times our lives were in peril. I was more referring to how it was the first time you _started to trust me_.”  
  
Derek blinks at her, then starts to smile, slow and sweet, the corners of his eyes crinkling. It’s the happiest she’s ever seen him, smiling at her in a stupid pool in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Fucking weirdo. It sets her heart fluttering anyway.  
  
He uses her distraction to dunk her, the gigantic asshole.  
  
It’s the best day she’s had in months.  
  
Naturally, that means that the universe has to throw them a curve-ball to make up for it.  
  
.  
  
Two days later, they start getting weird on her. First, Peter stops sleeping with them, which is fucking weird as all hell since he hasn't shown any signs of letting up on that arrangement, even back at the start, when Stiles flinched at his every move. Then Derek starts coming to bed in full wolf form, which is _cool_ , because his fur is super soft and waking up curled around a giant canine is therapeutic to just about anyone. It’s just as strange as the Peter thing though, because he’s never done that. Ever.  
  
Stiles starts catching them whispering to each whenever they think she’s not looking, going quiet the second she shuffles over. It wouldn’t bother her so much if they didn’t look so fucking guilty, like they’re planning something she isn’t part of.  
  
She was never a fan of Peter. Not before this. But he’s pack now. He keeps her safe and she _trusts_ him, which would have been dumb as hell back before the world went to shit, but now it’s instinct. Pure fucking instinct to trust _Peter Hale_ with her life as much as she trusts Derek.  
  
So it bugs her. It bugs her when Peter shies away from her touch, when he starts sleeping in another room completely. She feels like she’s losing him and it’s not until a week later that she realizes she was right.  
  
.  
  
The zombies show up out of nowhere. Well, no. That’s not entirely true. Peter’s the first to catch a whiff of them, when they’re a mile or so off from the hotel. There’s a lot of them apparently, because Peter and Derek start shouting at each other in the middle of the lobby, eyes flashing and teeth snapping like they hate each other all over again.  
  
Stiles doesn’t catch most of the argument, because the second she heard the word 'zombies' she’d sprinted upstairs and started shoveling shit into their bags.  
  
When she gets back downstairs though, they’re both too quiet, sitting in the lounge a couple feet away from each other.  
  
“What’s going on?” Stiles asks, heart thumping a little faster. Peter sighs, getting to his feet with a huff and crossing to her, coming to a stop right in front of her. “Peter?” she whispers, letting the bags drop to the ground with a quiet noise when he pulls her into a fierce, crushing hug. He rubs his nose into her neck and hesitantly, Stiles lets her arms go around his shoulders in return.  
  
He pulls back just when it’s getting uncomfortable, a smirk kicking up the corners of his mouth. He looks like the old Peter in that moment, the dangerous Peter that she's only ever seen resurface when she'd nearly gotten jumped in Indiana. She sucks in a shocked breath as he leans in, pressing his lips to her forehead, just a quick, dry kiss that makes dread curl low in her gut.  
  
“Take care of each other,” Peter whispers, and before she can grab for him, he’s shifted and bounding out the door.  
  
Seconds later, Derek has a hold of her elbow and is leading her to the door, bags hefted over his shoulder. “Derek?” she finds herself asking. “What’s going on? What was that? Derek?”  
  
“He’s buying us time,” Derek tells her, tossing the bags into the backseat of the SUV.

“He didn’t need to buy us time,” Stiles insists, heart stuttering in her chest. “We could have handled it. We’re okay—”  
  
A low moan sounds from around the corner of the hotel and she spins, gun held at the ready. Her eyes go wide.  
  
“That’s the horde?” she asks shakily, staring at the good fifteen zombies staggering around the corner. Derek shakes his head, growling as he gets a hold of her and manhandles her into the passenger seat. They’re coming in quickly, and she jumps when Derek slams the door behind her, snarling and swiping his claws across the first one’s throat.  
  
By the time he’s getting into the driver’s side, he’s covered in blood, and she doesn’t know how much of it is his, but the SUV is actually _surrounded_ when he throws it into reverse.  
  
“If that wasn’t the horde—”  
  
“There are dozens heading in from the city and we weren’t sure how many were behind them. That was just a group that we missed,” Derek hisses, swerving to avoid a cluster of what might have been high school cheerleaders at one point.  
  
“But—”  
  
“Not now, Stiles,” Derek growls, swiping a hand across his brow. It comes away wet, sweat and blood both, and when he sees it, he snarls viciously, and floors it.  
  
It wouldn’t worry her too much, normally. Stiles has seen him sweaty before. She's seen him after a bite, sweating it out, him and Peter both, but it wasn’t like this. Derek looks desperate, gritting his fangs, eyes glowing red as his claws cut into the steering wheel. He drives like he’s insane, like they’re trying to outrun the fucking devil, and she’s so scared that her hands are shaking.  
  
If he can’t do this, if Derek can’t heal the bites, Stiles can’t put him down. She can’t. Dad was it. Dad was her _one_ mercy killing of a loved one, and she can’t do that again, she can’t, not when Derek’s the only one left. She’d sooner fucking die with him.  
  
They’re a good two hundred miles away before Derek starts slowing down, corn fields stretching every which way. Stiles is watching them carefully for movement, but so far there’s been none.  
  
Another fifty miles, truly in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where Derek stops. He pulls to the side of the road carefully, claws still digging into the upholstery. He’s pale and sweaty, like he was when Kate had shot him full of wolfsbane, but there’s a flush of color high on his cheeks.  
  
She reaches for him, needing to touch, and he flinches away from her, eyes flaring brighter.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Derek gasps, leaning in to nuzzle her still out-stretched fingers briefly then pulling back just as quickly.  
  
Stiles stares at him, lips parted. There’s a part of her, the part still fresh from the loss of Peter, that wants to slap him. She wants to punch him in the face until he pulls her into a hug and god, she can’t fucking do this.  
  
She tells him as much, voice shaky. Her hair is mostly out of her ponytail, spilling out down her neck in messy, knotted waves, so she takes the time to push it away from her cheeks, not bothering to fix it properly.  
  
“Will you be okay on your own?” he asks her quickly, hissing it from between gritted teeth. “You can do this on your own, right? If anyone can, it’s you.”  
  
“What are you talking about?!” she shouts, horrified, her eyes wide. “No, I won’t be okay!”  
  
She lunges for him, closes a hand around his arm like she can actually stop him from going. He growls at her, snapping his teeth, and _that’s_ what makes her flinch away. “You can’t,” Stiles tells him in a small voice. “You can’t leave me. Please — please don’t make me do this alone. I can’t— I thought you assholes could heal? One lousy fucking bite—”  
  
“Bite?” Derek asks, blinking at her with hazy eyes. “What bite?”  
  
She flaps a hand at his person. “Whatever bite you’re hiding from me, dude. I mean, fuck, you look like you’ve had wolfsbane shoved down your throat. There’s no way that you’re—”  
  
_Okay. There’s no way you’re okay._ She swallows, hearing her throat click.  
  
“I didn’t get bitten,” Derek tells her quietly. For a moment, she thinks he’s going to lean in like he always does, rub his scent onto her skin, but he pulls back at the last second.  
  
“Sure,” she mutters, picking at a ragged fingernail so she doesn't have to look at him.  
  
“I _didn’t,_ ” he presses, using the tip of a claw to tilt her chin up. “I— it’s complicated.”  
  
“So explain it,” she growls, baring her teeth the way Peter taught her. “Tell me, because I’ve been doing complicated for a long fucking time now—”  
  
“It’s a _heat_ ,” Derek interrupts, eyes flashing. “A biological breeding imperative. We get them once a year. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we'll go two or three without having one, but without an anchor, we lose control. It’s… difficult to survive the process if we don't have one.”  
  
“God, you have bad timing,” she breathes, taking a deep breath to wrap her mind around the fact that he’s what? So fucking horny he’s losing his mind? That makes no fucking sense. None. “Good thing you have an anchor then.”  
  
“Not that kind of anchor,” he snarls, claws digging back into the console. She watches with wide eyes as he tears jagged marks into it. “A person. A _mate,_ or failing that, someone who’s willing to get us through it.”  
  
“So what? If you don’t find your mate you’ve got to hire a prostitute?”  
  
Derek laughs like he’s dying. It’s not a happy laugh. “No. No, I mean, sometimes, yes. But mostly it’s a pack member willing to hold our hands and walk us through it.”  
  
“So, there we go. Problem solved. I hold your hand and get you full of fluids and everything will be awesome,” she tells him with a shaky grin, heart pounding away in her chest.  
  
He’s already shaking his head. “That won’t work.”  
  
“Why the fuck not?”  
  
He looks pained. “I— I won’t be satisfied,” he says slowly, carefully. “With just that. Not from you.”  
  
She blinks, processing. Somewhere in her brain there’s a big 404 page not found sign blinking in the brightest color imaginable. “You—”  
  
“Yes,” he snarls.  
  
“Oh,” she says, blankly. “Wow. Okay.”  
  
Then Stiles crawls over the middle console and into his lap. To her surprise, he does not immediately claw her to within an inch of her life, he just stares at her with wide eyes, clawed fingers settling very carefully on her hips.  
  
“Stiles—”  
  
“You are so fucking stupid,” she hisses, and leans in to kiss him.  
  
It’s a hard, bruising kiss, the one that she used to break out whenever Malia was feeling a little too itchy in her human skin. It hadn’t gotten her complaints then, and it sure doesn’t now, Derek groaning as he fists a hand in her hair and drags her closer. She can feel the jut of his cock against her thigh, and just the idea of it, there, _touching her_ , is enough to make molten heat explode inside of her.  
  
Derek, of course, pulls away before it starts getting really fun. He’s panting and sweaty, his eyes not even flashing back and forth anymore, firmly settled into red.  
  
“This isn’t a simple pity fuck, Stiles,” he snarls. “This is big—”  
  
“Oh, feeling modest, are we?”  
  
“You don’t understand. After this, there’s no going back. Not with you, okay? Not ever. If you do this—” He cuts himself off, bucking up against her when she rubs against him, stilling her a moment later with a bruising hand to the thigh. “—It’s forever, Stiles. That’s why Peter left, he didn’t want to…”  
  
“He didn’t want to hurt me,” Stiles finishes, glancing out the window. If he was going to lose control… Stiles remembers the last time he lost control. God, she fucking remembers it. She snorts. “Figured that it takes an apocalypse to make Peter into a decent person. Guess my milkshake really does bring all the Hales to the yard.”  
  
“This isn’t funny, Stiles—”  
  
She cuts him off with another kiss, softer this time. “I know,” she says when she pulls back. “I know that, okay? Forever is fine by me, dude. We don’t got a lot of it left to begin with, but I— if I had to pick someone to spend forever with, you aren’t a bad choice. We’re pack. You’re mine and I’m yours. This won’t change that.”  
  
“You’re sure—”  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” she growls, leaning in and sucking his ear lobe into her mouth.  
  
Derek wastes no time getting his hands on her after that, kissing her like he’ll die without it, which… yeah. Funnier when it’s not true. Stiles takes a moment to squirm out of her jeans and underwear, somehow managing to not set the horn off with her ass while she does so, and is back in his lap and fumbling at his zipper before he can do more than whine at her.  
  
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a condom?” she asks breathlessly when she gets his dick free. It’s a pretty dick, one that she wants to get her mouth on _desperately_ , but there will be time enough for that later. Probably.  
  
“No.” He grunts. “Wouldn’t work anyway.”  
  
She laughs against his mouth, taking hold of his dick and stroking it a couple times, just enough to make him shiver and buck up into her grip. “Dude, you aren’t _that_ big.”  
  
Derek blushes, biting down on his lip hard enough that it bleeds. “That’s not— it’s not size that’s the problem, I don’t—”  
  
“Oh,” she says, flashing back to Scott sitting on the edge of her bed, all wide-eyed and mortified, as he told her about how he and Allison had gotten _stuck_ , like _dogs_ , and _oh my god, Stiles, what do I do?_

“It’s a mate thing, isn’t it? The knot or whatever?” Because to her knowledge, it had never happened with him and Kira, and god, that’s so much sadder now that she knows about it. Allison and Scott really had been bound by fate.  
  
Derek nods, jerky-quick and gives her this look. “It’s okay,” she says, squirming. “I mean, babies in the middle of the apocalypse, not a great idea, the Walking Dead taught me that lesson but—”  
  
“You won’t get pregnant,” he gasps, hips twisting when she flicks her thumb over the head of his dick. “You ovulated last week, so you shouldn’t—”  
  
“Oh my god, you can smell that?” she gasps, staring at him, her hand faltering. “You know what, nevermind, I don’t want to hear.”  
  
“I can’t guarantee anything,” Derek says, biting his lip again. “But you shouldn’t. Probably.”  
  
“Oh goodie,” she snorts. “ _Probably_ won’t get pregnant. Awesome. Whatever. I don’t care, this is… all kinds of not your typical sexing anyway, so let’s just do this and cross our fingers. We’ll deal with babypocalypse if it happens.”  
  
Derek's looking hesitant again though, so she just rolls her eyes. “We’ll work something out. Fuck, next time this happens, we’ll get all prepared and shit and you can dump your super jizz in my ass all week or something.”  
  
“Oh my god,” he gasps, shoulders shaking. “That was—”  
  
“Least sexy thing ever? Yeah, I have no filter. You know this. Keep up.” Then she rolls her hips, angling his dick so it rubs against her clit, and sighs appreciatively.  
  
It isn’t the first dick she’s had. She lost her virginity to Malia, sure, and then there was that time with Lydia when they were both wasted, but she’s messed around with toys, and had sex with two guys — the first a cute kid who was part of the group touring Berkeley and the second was that time with Scott that they _never talked about_. Ever. For good reason.  
  
So Stiles isn’t exactly intimidated when she guides Derek’s dick where it needs to go, but she kind of is. Because it’s Derek — Derek Hale — the first dude who made her realize that yeah, maaaaybe not quite as gay as she thought. She hesitates, but not for long, not when she sees the expression on Derek’s face as he watches her. He’s still half-shifted, just the eyes, teeth, and claws, but there’s this weirdly soft expression on his face, so she smiles at him, and sinks down, slow and steady.  
  
He is actually bigger than Scott or the other dude — Jon? Jacob? — but it isn’t too bad. She may be out of practice, but she’s also hella fucking wet, so the slide down is slick and sweet.  
  
There’s a ripping sound from somewhere once she’s fully seated and she snorts when she realizes that Derek has _literally_ just torn a fucking chunk out of the seat.  
  
“You are ridiculous,” she tells him, and rolls her hips a little, just to gauge the feel of it.  
  
He feels phenomenally good inside of her and for a little while, she just rocks her hips back and forth, teasing him with a steady grin and her lips on his.  
  
There isn’t a whole lot of room for her to properly ride him, and she likes it better when he grabs her by the hips and fucks up into her anyway. It’s good, deeper and harder, and maybe she likes the feeling of his hands digging bruises into her waist a little more than she should.  
  
It’s over pretty quickly, but she’d expected that. She knows just how long these things last, even if she had dismissed it as myth until twenty some minutes ago. The feeling of him swelling inside her is one of the odder things she’s experienced, but she rolls with it, grinding back down onto his knot and milking it for all it’s worth.  
  
Stiles comes on his dick with her head thrown back and is left reeling, almost dizzy with the intensity of it. He’s still coming and it feels like it won’t end, it feels like he’s going to fill her up until she bursts with it. It's forever before he sighs and relaxes into her, pressing his face into her hair.  
  
“How long is this supposed to last anyway?” She shifts, but nope, they are definitely tied together for the time being.  
  
“A while,” he mumbles sleepily, mouthing absently at her neck.  
  
Stiles hums quietly and thinks about finding a house, one of those abandoned farm houses to camp out in for the week. God, that sounds good. The CD switches tracks and Stiles groans when 500 Miles comes on again. And to think she used to love this song.  
  
“So.” She shifts again, carefully, and asks, curious, “You think you can drive like this?”  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on tumblr! My [writing blog](http://callunawrites.tumblr.com/) and [my primary one](http://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/). :)


End file.
